Electric circuit devices are generally fabricated by mounting various kinds of circuit elements on a chip consisting of a printed circuit board However, a demand for more improving mounting efficiency is recently increasing. In order to meet such a demand, it is required to print various patterns with a soldering paste, pasty resist ink, adhesive paste or the like on printed circuit boards with high precision and efficiency. In general, screen printing is favorably used for printing fine patterns with such a paste. In order to satisfactorily perform such screen printing, it is necessary to thoroughly knead a paste or ink to be fed onto a screen so as to make its property uniform, and to certainly carrying out the adjustment of its viscosity and the control of its feed rate.
The feed of a paste to a screen printing machine has heretofore been carried out manually by an operator in most cases. Namely, the operator has kneaded the paste by means of a spatula and also controlled its viscosity and feed rate on his experiential judgment Recently, there has also been proposed a paste feeding apparatus in which a paste in a container is extruded from the container by a piston provided on the upper part of the container.
However, the manual feeding of the paste by the operator makes it extremely difficult to practically effect the kneading of the paste, the adjustment of its viscosity and the control of its feed rate with identical reproducibility at all times. It is therefore impossible to ensure high reliability. On the other hand, the conventional paste feeding apparatus serves only to feed a paste mechanically and hence involves a problem that it can not substantially knead the paste and also scarcely conduct the adjustment of its viscosity and the control of its feed rate.
The paste feeding apparatus is also accompanied by a problem that although the paste remaining in its container at the time its use has been ended must be stored under suitable conditions, the container portion alone can not be received in a refrigerator or the like to store the paste because an agitator is integrally incorporated in this apparatus.